Just war of self-defence or slaughter of the innocent - one conflict through different eyes

Two weeks of violence in Lebanon have seen an estimated 616 people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. Suzanne Goldenberg and Rory McCarthy speak to some of those caught in the conflict on both sides

The Lebanese victim - Riaz Juma'a The monotony is a comfort. For the last 11 days, Riaz Juma'a has risen regularly at 8.30am in his makeshift bedroom in the cardiology ward of Jabal Amal hospital. He spends the next 12 hours watching the wounded and the dead come through the hospital gates. It makes him a feel a little less alone, he says. "I feel like they are all my family, and that I am not by myself."

Riaz's real family was destroyed on the afternoon of July 17 when his wife and two young daughters were killed by an Israeli air attack, which flattened their house in the village of Hosh, outside Tyre. A Nigerian member of Unifil, the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, and his wife also died. Riaz had stepped out a few minutes earlier.

In the rubble of what was once a handsome two-storey villa, UN crews this week pulled out a few leaves from the family photo album. Riaz's wife, Rayan, looks out from the front page, blue eyes lit up in a smile. She was 24 years old. Riaz looks happy.

In those days, he ran a shop across the road from the hospital offering a wide selection of chocolates. The shop remains open, but hospital orderlies now congregate around the till.

Riaz is at the hospital, hiding his grief behind dark sunglasses and clouds of cigarette smoke at the desk of the public health officer on the ground floor. He plays solitaire on the computer, and boils Arabic coffee. Sometimes relatives appear to ask for directions. Riaz says he can't be bothered to help.

He has not been to his home in suburban Tyre since his family was killed, and he has not visited his in-laws' house in Hosh, where they died. His parents want him to come to Beirut, but he does not want to go there either."Too many memories," he says.

Amid all this pain, he has found a refuge at the hospital, where the doctors are respectful of his grief. "The director of the hospital is like my family," he says. "The hospital is my second home."

Yesterday, giant bulldozers pulled Rayan's body from the rubble. The bodies of Riaz's children, Alice, six, and Celine, two, were also recovered. Riaz could not bear to be there, or even contemplate holding a funeral. He will bury his family after the war, he says.SG

The Israeli soldier - Sgt Dori, 21 When the conflict broke out Sergeant Dori, 21, an Israeli from Modi'in, had only six months to go in his three-year compulsory military service. He was ordered straight to the front in one of the combat engineer units that has been leading ground operations into southern Lebanon, attacking and destroying Hizbullah positions. Since then he has crossed into Lebanon six times.

"It was nothing like we trained for, but when you are inside you don't think about it. You just do your job," he says. Since joining the army he has already fought in several operations in Gaza, when it was still occupied. Lebanon, he says, is very different.

"This is a total war. With the operations in Gaza you go in for one operation and come out. Here you have helicopters, armoured corps, artillery. It's much more intense."

Now he is with the rest of his unit, resting in the shade near the Israeli border and waiting for their next operation. Ultra-religious Jews wander through the crowds of soldiers offering cookies, and an ice-cream van passes by.

Dori says he has heard criticisms from abroad about the high toll of Lebanese civilian casualties, but insists Israel's war is legitimate. "We don't [kill civilians] on purpose. We could go in with planes and kill everybody but we don't do that. We go in by land, we do it surgically," he says. "Hizbullah's main goal is to get us out of here, to conquer Israel, like every terrorist. So I feel proud of what we're doing."

Dori has shot and killed people during the fighting, but feels unmoved. "I don't feel any regret. I don't feel sorry for the loss of those lives because I know I am defending many other lives. I feel I'm doing my mission, which is to save my people and that's why I became a combat soldier in the army."

When his military service is up, he plans a long holiday. "I'm thinking Thailand, maybe South Africa. Something to clear my mind."RM

The Lebanese refugee - Naila Awada, 57 Her brother left, fleeing the Israeli air attacks around the villages of south Lebanon for the relative safety of Beirut. The neighbours left, and soon Naila Awada was reduced to begging anyone leaving the village to for space in their car. The problem was there were two of them: Naila, and her mother, Zeinab. At 90, Zeinab has been incapacitated by a stroke, and has been bedridden for years. Naila, 57, has never married. She has spent a lifetime caring for her mother - and her father before he died.

Propped up on her cot, Zeinab is agitated. She rocks back and forth, and tries to speak, although her words are not easily intelligible. Naila does her best to calm her, patting the corner of her mother's blue headscarf. She scrabbles around for the plastic carrier bag where she keeps her mother's medications. There are about two days' supply left.

Naila last set foot in Beirut during Israel's Grapes of Wrath campaign in 1996, and now she is desperate to escape. But there is no way out. One brother emigrated to Germany years ago; another lives in Beirut. A third brother, the last male relative in Bazuriya, managed to find a place in a car for himself, but not for his sister and mother. "We asked a lot. The people said no," she says. "We just couldn't find a car."

Nowadays, there are several hundred people left in Bazuriya, east of Tyre, which normally has a population of 12,000. Like the Awadas, most are too elderly or infirm, or too poor, to leave.

As the possibilities of flight recede, Naila focuses her energies on keeping her mother alive. "I can't die now," she says. A neighbour, before departing, offered the women the use of his house: a formidable stone building that offers better shelter from Israeli missiles. Does she think she will at last get her mother out of here? "God only knows." SG

The Israeli victim - Tamim Swaid, 24 Tamim Swaid was preparing for exams in the prestigious Haifa Technical College when the conflict broke out. His father was so unnerved by the waves of Hizbullah rockets that he persuaded his son to leave his studies and come home to his village, Pki'in, a mainly Arab Druze community in the rolling hills of the north. So Tamim, an electrical engineering student, packed up and went home. He was happy to be back. "My village is the most beautiful place in the whole world. I love it," he said.

The next day Tamim and a friend were pulling up in a car outside his father's house. As he opened the door and stepped out, a Katyusha rocket thundered into the ground barely 20 metres away from him, hurling him into the air.

"It landed just behind me. I can't tell you what it was like when it hit, but I knew immediately what it was. What else could it be?" he said. "I was so scared, I was dying of fear."

He fell to the floor, his back and leg torn apart with dozens of shards of shrapnel. Two weeks and several operations later, Tamim is sitting in slippers and a pair of purple pyjamas by his hospital bed, weak but out of danger, and chatting to his friends and parents. A small plastic tube runs discreetly from his abdomen to a medical container beneath his chair, the last of several tubes inserted during the operations.

Doctors have told him he might be home within a week, although there are still many months of rehabilitation ahead. He has a slice of shrapnel the size of a coin lodged in his liver, which surgeons are reluctant to remove. The attack has left him wishing for the war to end. "It is such a bad situation," he said. "I don't know what Hizbullah want, I don't know what they are doing. I just want it to stop. It is not a way for human beings to behave."RM